Blue Origin's New Shepard rocket is designed to be fully
reusable. But unlike other commercial spaceflight companies, Blue
Origin has remained very secretive about its rocket tech.

Now we finally got our first glimpse of the company's New Shepard
rocket in action when Blue Origin released its first test flight video on April 30. And we
have to say the rocket is pretty impressive:

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Blue Origin

It launched out of the company's test grounds in Texas on April
29 and soared to over 300,000 feet.

Blue Origin

New Shepard carries a six-person space capsule that the company
hopes will someday ferry astronauts into space. The idea is to
jettison the space capsule after launch and then recover the
rocket in a vertical landing.

The jettison part of the test flight was flawless:

Blue Origin

And Blue Origin did successfully recover the space capsule. It
floated down to Earth suspended under parachutes:

Blue Origin

"Any astronauts on board would have had a very nice journey into
space and a smooth return," Bezos said on his blog.

The rocket recovery, however, did not work out.

"In fact, if New Shepard had been a traditional
expendable vehicle, this would have been a flawless first test
flight," Bezos wrote. "Of course one of our goals is reusability,
and unfortunately we didn’t get to recover the propulsion module
because we lost pressure in our hydraulic system on descent."